Ireland
Veronica Lee
The most striking thing about the 1976 documentary (restored and re-released by the BFI) is just how polite Billy Connolly comes across as. Not that he's impolite now, but the raucous stage presence and vibrant chatshow interviewee was yet to fully form.Murray Grigor's film, which follows Connolly's first gigs in Ireland in 1975, shows the comedian long before he achieved the national treasure status he now enjoys. The Dublin and Belfast dates came just after Connolly's appearance on Michael Parkinson's chat show had made him an overnight star, and backstage in Dublin the Glaswegian frets Read more ...
L'Olimpiade, Irish National Opera review - Vivaldi's long-distance run sustained by perfect teamwork
David Nice
In Vivaldi’s more extravagant operas, some of the arias can seem like a competition for the gold medal. L’Olimpiade is relatively modest in most of its demands, with one notable exception, and Irish National Opera’s track record in exemplary casting across the board gave us a relay race from an ideal team, keeping the work’s trajectory from modest introductions to greater depth and fire in the set pieces stylishly on course.The guiding hands are Peter Whelan’s both on the harpsichord, in crucial recitativo secco dialogue with the inventiveness of Pablo FitzGerald on archlute. So they were in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Poor fox,” says Rose Dugdale. She is standing beside her very rich mama and papa in the grounds of their stately home, her face blooded after the killing of her first fox. She knows this vicious upper-class ritual is wrong. It’s 1951 and she is 10. Hardcore challenges to the British establishment lie ahead.Baltimore, directed by Irish husband-and-wife team Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (Rose Plays Julie; The Future Tense), is based on real events, though it’s certainly not a biopic (The Heiress and the Heist, a fascinating documentary series about Dugdale, was released last year).Dugdale’s Read more ...
India Lewis
The Dome, as the opening act, Clara Mann noted, is a normally a heavy metal venue (black or dark purple tour bus parked outside, a long queue of piercings and mohawks). It was a lovely confounding of expectations, therefore, to stage Mann’s own plaintive “sad sad” guitar songs (her description) and John Francis Flynn’s inventive and reinterpreted trad folk here. Mann’s voice is beautifully clear, with just the right amount of ornamentation to simplicity, her accompaniment on guitar undercutting her songs without overwhelming their sparse, quietude. A highlight was a song she introduced Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was barely a month ago that screenwriters Jack and Harry Williams astounded viewers with Boat Story. Now they’re back with a sequel (or maybe just a continuation) of The Tourist, which debuted a year ago with its mind-bending story of the amnesiac Elliot Stanley (Jamie Dornan), who found himself all at sea in the Australian outback.Now, Elliot is travelling the world with girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), but they’re diverted from a railway journey to Cambodia by a mysterious letter, which prompts them to travel to Elliot’s native Ireland in search of his real identity. Of which, so Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
David Ireland’s Edinburgh Fringe hit Ulster American is essentially a play about a play that a Hollywood big name has been cast in by a leading English theatre director. Appropriately, it stars two actual Hollywood “big names”, Woody Harrelson and Andy Serkis, the latter seen here for once without motion-capture tags or prosthetics. Welcome back.The setting is a typical middle-class period house In London, gutted and expensively decorated, where Leigh (Serkis, pictured below left) is preparing for a meeting with the Oscar-winning star of his latest production, Jay Conway (Harrelson, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was something misleading about the opening of this concert. As Andrew John Hozier-Byrne and his band stepped onstage, the stage was lit up by a single spotlight, focused around the microphone that the singer stepped up to. Yet the following two hours were anything but a one-man band, with the collective of musicians assembled behind him given ample room to shine, to mostly positive but occasionally negative effect.That arrival was greeted rapturously by the Glasgow crowd, who had already responded warmly to support act the Last Dinner Party and then entertained themselves by singing Read more ...
peter.quinn
This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human warmth.Commissioned by The Dock, a multidisciplinary arts centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, the song cycle sees Tobin working for the first time with both traditional Irish musicians and jazz improvisers. As Tobin noted, it was also possibly the first time ever that uilleann pipes have featured as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.The piper Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine a Glyndebourne season where all those promising young singers in the chorus get to be principals in a series of fringe operas. At Wexford, they already have their work cut out, though this year not so much in the three main rarities – hence the sheer joy of witnessing so many fine performances in Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, Donizetti’s La fille du régiment and Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri.To catch four operas and a recital in one day, as well as another comedy the following morning, is unique in my experience to date. And there were abundant pleasures and Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Dance First takes its title from a line in Samuel Beckett’s most famous work Waiting for Godot. “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” says the tramp Estragon of Pozzo’s slave Lucky, who then proceeds to do both in a typically absurd Beckettian way.The Irish writer’s bleak worldview often manifested itself in slapstick comedy and nonsense, but you wouldn’t know it from James Marsh’s tasteful film, another biopic following his The Theory of Everything (2014) about Stephen Hawking, and the less successful portrait of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, The Mercy (2017 Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It is 1864 and the lush green lawns of Knowl, the stately home in Ireland that Maud Ruthyn (Agnes O’Casey) will inherit when she reaches the age of 21, are beautifully kept. Everything is in its place. Maud expects deference, especially from the domestic staff.Maud is a steely character, so when the trustees of her late father’s estate advise her to go against the terms of his will and appoint them as trustees to her fortune, she instantly suspects them of being on the make. They are merely trying to warn her that her wily Uncle Silas (David Wilmot, pictured below), a suspected murderer Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If I had to condense the Catholic faith of my upbringing in one sentence, I would say that it essentially comes down to two things: we're all sinners, but we are all capable of redemption. (Theological experts may take a different view.) That boiled-down notion appears to be the takeaway of Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Miracle Club, set in 1967 working-class Ballygar, just outside Dublin – the kind of place whose residents live there their entire life.It concerns three women who go to Lourdes “for the cure”. Anyone not au fait with the Marian devotion central to Irish Catholicism in that period Read more ...